As a lifelong reader, I admit it's always a challenge to pick out just one book and write about it. Just one book that changed my life? Before I could speak, my parents tell me, I would follow them around with my childish books, pleading wordlessly with them to read them to me.
But then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning from the Great Beyond. What about my religious conversion and deconversion? Both were sparked by books, and both did indeed literally change my life.
So come with me, fellow reader, back into the dark ages of the early '80s, when a thirteen year old girl picked up a religious pamphlet and her life changed...
As a lifelong reader, I admit it's always a challenge to pick out just one book and write about it. Just one book that changed my life? Before I could speak, my parents tell me, I would follow them around with my childish books, pleading wordlessly with them to read them to me.
But then it hit me, like a bolt of lightning from the Great Beyond. What about my religious conversion and deconversion? Both were sparked by books, and both did indeed literally change my life.
So come with me, fellow reader, back into the dark ages of the early '80s, when a thirteen year old girl picked up a religious pamphlet and her life changed...
Now, I must have read evangelistic materials before. I had friends who went to Christian churches and I read voraciously (still do). They had not made much of an impression on me, though, as at this time I was an atheist. A barely-teenage, angry atheist mostly because the kids at school who teased me were Christians, but still an atheist. My parents and I when we attended church went to a Unitarian Universalist gathering about an hour away from home.
But for whatever reason, be it the anger and hurt I felt that day, the deep desire for love and acceptance, or a genuine Divine miracle, I read a Christian pamphlet I'd saved up hoping to make fun of it, Power for Living, and instead became a Christian believer.
Of course, looking back on it now, it is a pathetic document. Dr. J is a Christian, so you should be? Right...good thing I didn't read a pamphlet on other great leaders from other religions, or I'd have converted to theirs. But to the thirteen year old me, it made sense. It also caused me some problems. I felt that I had to hide my new conversion from my parents, for one thing. (Didn't work out very well, by the way.) I couldn't attend a deeply theologically conservative congregation, for another, as I had no transportation. When my parents took me to the UU church we had been attending, I refused to take part in their services and was offended at some of the comments they made criticizing bad Christian practices.
It also fostered some good practices for me, however. As a practically "solitary Christian" practitioner, I easily integrated my liberal political views with my religion. After all, any liberal Christians or educated amateurs in the Bible know there are very liberal attitudes in the Gospels and the Old Testament, including a great emphasis on giving to the poor and protecting them against the rich and powerful. I also found it fairly easy to dismiss arguments for conservative politics in the Christian books I read. Those people were just wrong, and obviously so.
Okay, okay, I was a very black and white thinker in my teenage years. But I did eventually not only grow up, but expose myself to other ideas about religion and faith, including making non-Christian friends on the Internet and in real life.
Now, one thing you may not know about the theologically conservative (TC) Christian communities out there is that they lie, desperately, about non-Christians. Some of those lies are based on confusion, I believe, and some are not. For example, some lies are grounded in "one publication from a non-Christian group says X, so X is what they believe," when the TCs fail to recognize that a lot of non-Christian groups aren't hierarchical and one guy's opinion is just one guy's opinion, not the non-Christian pope's opinion. I'd call that confusion.
One flat-out lie TCs tell is that non-Christians recognize that Christianity (their version) is the one and only truth, but reject it as such. Now, think about that for a second. That would mean, in their theology, that every non-Christian adult out there actively wants to go to hell and be tortured forever. Does that make any sense? At all? Of course not. But if you insulate yourself inside that kind of community thinking, it's hard to see how absurd it is.
When I stopped insulating myself, I started seeing how silly this kind of thing was. And how silly some of the Bible is. But I remained a Christian. I just (without calling it such) liberalized my views. Of course some of the Bible is silly! The people at the time were doing their best, but they got some things wrong.
But more and more things kept going wrong with my Christianity, and I realized that it didn't really fit me any more. I didn't know what to do, though. I liked being a Christian. I still felt God in my life. And then a friend of mine recommended I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
Now, this is a phenomenally silly book. Its "theory" that the Merovingikalstaian dynasty was descended from Jesus makes no sense and expresses more the desire of its authors to believe this than shows real-world evidence for it. But about the last quarter of it is an eye-opener for any Biblical literalist, as I still believed myself to be at the time...because it gives sensible alternative versions of Bible verses. It shows that interpretation of the Bible can be further reaching and less "obvious" than one is taught in the TC Christian community. And when it did that, my time as a Christian was over. It took me a little longer to admit it, as I still had strong emotional attachment to the identity I'd forged, but I deconverted partly as the result of reading that tremendously silly book.
And then I found that the God-presence inside me could be seen much better through Pagan lenses. But that's a story for another day.